Angel Dust
A/N: So this chapter is kinda long, but there was a lot to explain, so I hope you don't mind. Also, I'm not sure how much updating I'll get to do in the next few days, as I'm in the process of moving to a new place. Hopefully, this will hold you all over until I get a chance to update again. Thanks again for the great reviews - you guys are awesome and I mean it when I say I love you all for giving this story a chance. I hope you Enjoy!
They walked for what seemed like an eternity. Dave followed the small, blonde woman in the white lab coat through hall after identical hall, finally stopping outside a heavy chrome door, which was also identical to every other door he had seen.
"What are we doing?" he asked. She turned and smiled at him coyly. "Ya know, I was kind of in the middle of something back there." She rolled her dark eyes and pushed the door open with her shoulder.
As Dave entered, he thought about his first moments here, on the Other Side. If he focused, he could still remember his chest tightening. His blood pulsed thickly, as though he could feel it slowing to a stop in his veins. His stomach lurched.
And the world as he knew it disappeared. That was it. He was dead. And he knew it.
Opening his eyes for the first time, he nearly laughed. "Death is like Star Trek," he thought as his gaze drifted around a futuristic, high-tech room with white walls and chrome machinery. "Without all the hot alien chicks."
"David Batista. You're awake," a young man in a lab coat stated, as though the man lying before him might not be aware.
"This is hell?" Dave asked, sitting up on the table.
The young man shook his head. "Heaven and hell, as you have come to hear of them, do not exist, Mr. Batista," he informed the much larger man before him. "This is all there is – what you will see here. The good and the bad, they all arrive here."
The young man, who had flatly introduced himself as Joey Styles, took him on a short tour of the nondescript white halls, before stopping before a large silver door.
"This is your room," Joey said.
"Home Sweet Home," Dave sighed, pushing the door open with his shoulder.
Little did he know that home was exactly what rested on the other side of that door. Down to the smallest detail, his "room" was an exact replica of the apartment he had shared with Courtney for the last three years. "What is this?" he asked.
Joey stood just outside the doorway, the same blank expression on his face that he had carried all day. "Each person, upon arrival, is given a room that best represents his or her most vivid memories, be they good or bad. Yours," he nodded, "Each of them, without fail, contain her," he nodded to a platform in the center of the room.
With a flicker and a start, an image sprang to life on the platform, and Dave found his heart jump into his throat when Courtney reached out a thin hand to touch his face in the casket. It was as if she was right there in his living room. "How did you?" Dave started.
The young man stepped into the room. "This is your connection to the living, Mr. Batista. Any time you want to know what's going on with anyone you care about, you concentrate on the platform and think of their name or image. They will appear, in Real Time, just as they are on earth." He explained things as if he were speaking to a small child, clear but without frustration.
"Can I. . ." he looked up, his hand poised in the air. "Can I touch her?"
Nodding, Joey motioned for Dave to reach out a hand. "You can touch her, talk to her, watch her. Basically, you can do anything you would have done with her when you were alive," he explained.
Dave raised an eyebrow. "Anything?"
It wasn't the first time Joey had heard the question. "She can't see or hear you. She will have an awareness of your presence. As for the other things you have in mind. . . no, you can't," he shifted uncomfortably. Regaining his composure, he straightened his tie and leaned against one of the chairs in Dave's room. "There is a catch, of course."
Unable to tear his eyes away from Courtney, Dave grunted slightly. "Catch?"
"You can only be in as much contact with the living as they will allow. As time passes, and memories fade, you will find it more and more difficult to reach them. As they forget the sound of your voice, you won't be able to speak to them anymore. When they forget the feeling of your fingers on their skin, you won't be able to touch them." He narrowed his eyes slightly and nodded toward the image of Courtney once more. "When she accepts the embrace of another man, you won't be able to comfort her." He said nothing more, only disappeared from sight.
His words hit Dave like a truck in that instant. He hadn't said "IF they forget. . ." He had said "WHEN." Someday, Courtney would begin to forget him. And though the letter he had written her a few months ago encouraged her to move on in his absence, Dave wasn't sure he liked the idea of being forgotten.
"Mr. Batista?" The blonde's voice drew him back to the present as he shook his head and narrowed his eyes. "Please come in."
Stepping through the doorway, Dave instantly felt a chill. This room was not like any of the others he had seen. It was empty. He was surrounded on all sides by gray, uninviting concrete. "What the hell?" he asked in confusion.
"Relax, Dave," a boisterous voice laughed from the corner.
Turning, Dave's expression drifted from one of perplexity to one of knowing realization. "Of course you had something to do with this," he laughed as his good friend, Eddie Guerrero, pushed off the wall and extended a hand.
The two men had developed a friendship in college, one that continued to thrive even when they took different paths to career success. While they both found their success in the media, Eddie's had been in front of the camera. As an A-List movie star, his troubles with drugs and alcohol had been well-documented. And his recovery had been even more widely-publicized.
Even Dave had been happy for his friend when Eddie announced that he was going to focus on his family, and on being clean, after years of partying hard at his friend's side. So when he had died suddenly, apparently of a heart attack, the world had mourned in shock and disbelief. For the first time in his life, Dave found himself openly weeping in a televised interview with Charles Gibson as he recalled memories of his old friend.
But they were once again reunited, inseparable, on the other side. And Dave was fairly certain that there were days it would have been unbearable without his friend's humor and encouragement. Though they were no longer sharing a pipe, they found other ways to occupy their time – usually watching the ones they loved while sharing drinks and laughs.
Eddie shook his head. "Oh, no, Homes," he shook his head as he released Dave's hand. "This is all Trish's doing." The blank look on Dave's face put another smile on Eddie's lips. "You haven't been formally introduced?"
Stepping forward, the blonde thrust her hand forward. "Trish Stratus," she said confidently, wrapping her thin hand around Dave's considerably larger one. "I was always a big fan of yours," she added.
Dave smiled slightly at the compliment, but then blinked again. "What the hell is going on here?" He didn't scare easily, but this whole thing felt a little shifty. "You said I could help Courtney," he spat, remembering her words from earlier.
With a nod, Trish stepped toward the middle of the room, her eyes focused in rapt concentration. In a flash, Courtney's image appeared. Dave's heart nearly broke as he watched his wife crying herself to sleep. "You want her to stop crying for you?"
He nodded, once again taken with her beauty. It was as if death had only made his love for her stronger. Watching her wander through life, seemingly aimless in her attempts to put the past behind her and move forward, was hard for him. He had loved her focus, her determination, and her tenacity. The woman he watched clutching a pillow to muffle her strangled sobs was not his wife.
"Tell him," Eddie encouraged, a smile on his face as wide as his Texas homeland.
Dave looked from one of them to the other and then back to Courtney as she rolled over in the bed, exposing her body from the waist up. Though his emotions, and his spirit, were still fully aroused at the sight of her naked form, he wondered if he would ever grow accustomed to the fact that his body could not react. He had watched her shower, sleep, and masturbate more times than he could count over the last year, but with blood no longer circulating through his body, he had nothing to touch in response to her beauty.
As Dave let out a groan, Trish put a hand on his arm. "Mr. Batista, I'm an angel," she started. He rolled his eyes. "Seriously."
Looking at her critically, he finally shrugged his shoulders. "So?"
"She moves between the living and the dead," Eddie finally explained, unable to hold his excitement back any longer. "She can exist here, and on Earth. We can see her, and so can they."
His friend was laughing, but Dave was sure he was missing something. So what if this angel could go to Earth? How was that supposed to help him? Or Courtney? "And?" he finally asked.
With her hands on her hips, Trish shook her head. "And I can talk to Courtney for you," she laid it out simply. The look of shock on Dave's face made her smile.
"But I thought Joey said there was no heaven or hell as we know it," Dave finally stated, turning away from his wife's image to address the man and woman before him. "Would that not then negate the existence of all those we believe to inhabit those places?"
Rolling his eyes, Eddie draped an arm over Trish's shoulder. "You'll have to excuse him. Dave's motto is, Why say something in a few words that everyone can understand, when you can make yourself look like a pompous asshole with a lot of big words that only serve to confuse us all? David," he added, snapping his fingers. "Angels exist."
"It's true, Mr. Batista, that the traditional rewards of heaven, or punishments of hell, are not as you were taught in Sunday School. But those who strived toward making their world a better place, reap the rewards of such sacrifices in death." She sighed and leaned against the wall.
"I could have snorted enough narcotics to kill a large horse while I was alive," she narrowed her eyes at him with playful harshness, "But I chose not to. I chose not to lie, cheat, and steal," she turned to Eddie with a smile, "I chose to be good, and this is my reward."
"So you just flutter down there, and flit back up here? Whenever you feel like it?" Dave shook his head in disbelief. "How does that work? How does your family deal with that?"
Sinking to the floor, Trish pulled her knees to her chest. "Some of the same rules apply to me, as they do with you. I can't be seen or heard by those who loved me while I was alive. I can only interact with others, those I didn't know before. I can help them, entertain them. Sometimes I just sit in a coffee shop, or at a bar, and listen to them talk about their problems." With a slight shrug, she smiled up at him. "It's all very sappy – very Touched By An Angel."
There was a warmth about Trish that drew him to her, even when he wanted to be skeptical. He could see, easily, why those in need of a listening ear would turn to her. "But how can you help me then?"
"I can't believe I told my friends you were brilliant," Trish groaned, leaping to her feet again. "It's obvious, isn't it?" When he shook his head, she stepped forward slightly. "I can talk to Courtney? I can befriend her, listen to her, put her on the path to happiness again? Any of this sounding like a plan to you, Mr. Hot Shot Investigative Reporter?" He bit his lip, bewilderment etched on his handsome feature. "Shit! You are the poster child for "Just Say No." All those drugs you thought were so harmless? They scrambled your brain like truck stop eggs. You know that, right?"
Eddie laughed again and slapped Dave on the back. "Trish befriended my Vickie after I died. She introduced her to the man she's married to now. She babysat my girls, let them talk out their feelings about losing me. She's very good at what she does."
"Why would you do that for me?" Dave asked suddenly. He had spent more than twenty years refusing to trust virtually everyone. He wasn't sure there was any reason to start now. "I mean, it's against the rules, right? Why else would you bring me to an unmonitored room?"
"What is that? A trace of the genius still lives?" Trish smiled and then bit her lip, raising an eyebrow. "Well, I guess "lives" isn't the right word," she smirked, and then cleared her throat when Dave's expression said he wasn't amused. Crossing her arms over her ample chest, she shook her head. "Yes, it's against the rules for me to interact on anyone's behalf. For all intents and purposes, death is the end. There is no communication, no interference, beyond that point."
Crossing his own arms, Dave took a hard stance and stared her down with his "I Don't Buy Your Bull Shit" glare. It had gotten him true confessions from some of the most powerful people in the world, and he was sure it would work on the bubbly little thing standing before him now.
Unwaivering, Trish shrugged. "I'm a sucker for a good love story," she admitted. "I've seen you talk about Courtney. Eddie's told me stories about how she affected you as a man, about how evident your love is for her." She turned back to the sleeping woman appearing in the middle of the room, noting that Courtney's shoulders were still shaking in silent tears. When Dave followed her gaze, Trish watched his entire countenance change. "I will help you because of that look," she pointed to his face.
Unsure of what to say, Dave walked over to Courtney and placed a large hand on her shoulder. The trembling began to subside as her eyes drifted open toward the ceiling. "You want me to live?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep and tears. "How do I do that without you?"
When he stepped away from his wife, Dave shared a knowing look with Eddie. "Okay," he sighed, turning his attention to Trish. "I'm in. But there are rules."
"You don't always have to be the boss, Homes," Eddie rolled his eyes, but Dave's stance did not change.
"She's my wife," he reminded. "We'll do this my way."